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From Clicks to Conversions at the SEOmoz Training Raceway

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community.The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not
reflect the views of Moz.

Day 1 of SEOmoz Pro Training was like being at a race track. The course careened from clicks to conversions and from search results to landing pages. The audience watched 9 speakers drive their search marketing race cars at speeds faster than fingers can type. Given the finger-breaking speeds, it was fortunate all SEO fans were well fueled - beginning with a healthy breakfast buffet, mid-morning energy bars, lunch (more all-you-can-eat) and a scrumptious mid-afternoon pit stop with fresh cookies and treats. After everyone was fed each time, it was off to the races.

Todd Freisen was in the sports booth service as emcee, host of ceremonies, referee, judge and time keeper. The event was like a well-oiled machine. Maybe that's why they call Todd, "Oilman."

When I said "yes" to attending the Mozinar on a Press Pass, I didn't realize I was going to be covering a sporting event. GoodNewsCowboy asked me how I was going to recap and condense this "wild ride." I realized there was a lot of horsepower on-stage and that we were at the SEOmoz Training Raceway.

Mozinar fans experienced exhilaration and gleaned insights as we watched performance race car drivers present their seminar presentations. The following race highlights are condensed from 32 pages of notes. I strongly suggest you buy the Pro Seminar DVD when it's produced so you can see under the hood for yourself.

From Clicks to Conversions with Local, Social, Analytics and SEO in Between

1st up: Rand Fishkin had pole position and drove a car with a most unusual name, "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad SERP."

The results we are seeing in blended search results are even more unusual, starting with changes of the past 2 weeks. For those who attend SEO races regularly and are watching Google, this may be old news. For others, brace yourself. A branded search can have more than 2 results. Rand explained:

You have to be seen as a brand.

You have to have lots of links pointing to those pages with the brand name.

You need to have a high volume set of people searching for those terms, so off-site advertising and media buys can influence the SERPs.

Changes to Image SEO was next, and guess what? Google has a new image search interface.

Understand, and be prepared. You will not always get the same position in the blended results, leading to frustration.

Image SEO value is reduced by the new overlay.

The image below results from clicking on one of the images for the artist "manet" and clicking on an image

Tip: Write some JavaScript that breaks the overlay to avoid having the image overlay. Not only does it produce the longest, ugliest URL, but "it’s just an invite to right click and steal this image."

Rand covered 10 Tips for Image Rankings. (Since we are in race synopsis mode, we'll speed through this.) One quick takeaway was the minimum image size:

Image Pixel Size - If you go smaller than 400x300 pixels your chances to show in image search are dramatically decreased.

So you don't have to remember any formulas, basic on-page SEO factors for image SEO include page title and surrounding text.

Video SERPs

It’s or easier to get into video SERPs than to get into the regular SERPS. There is lower competition than ordinary results (most of the time), so take the opportunity. Follow this inclusion process to enter your video race for top ranking:

Rand's foot stayed pedal-to-the-metal as he showed how to produce Rich Snippets in the SERPs. Why is this important? This is where you get most of your clicks. His closing remarks were retweeted with fervor:

"If you can stay on top of this, you will have a big win. It demands full-time SEO."

2nd up: David Mihm was full-speed as he raced through "Ranking in Competitive Local Results." He explained:

Straight from Google’s mouth: Local intent is 20% of total search volume (April 2010)

And who would imagine that local results could equal 100% of page 1? Try a search for "dentist chicago." (If it's not 100%, it's close.)

Google organic results are not, however, the dominate factor for local search. Neither are results from Yahoo! or Bing. Local search is now:

Craigslist

Twitter

FaceBook

Citysearch

Google Products

Mobile devices

Garmin GPS

Wikipedia

Virtual Augmented Reality

Understand that local requires a different mindset from traditional SEO, because the ecosystems vary:

3rd up to race: Dan Zarrella racing in the "Science of Twitter" car. Dan warned us he talked fast. Pro Seminar attendees listened attentively, but given the subject was Twitter ... many tweeted insights into how one can get clicks and retweets.

Dan's takeaways were in 140. Below are my fave top three:

Takeaway: Don’t talk about yourself so much.

Paraphrased: If you want more followers, stop talking about yourself!

Takeaway: Try to stay positive.

If you want to get bummed out, people can go on the News. Even if talking about the oil spill, stay hopeful.

Takeaway: If you want people to click your links, Tweet slower.

Don't "go Oprah" on your Twitter account, moderate.

Improve your "retweetability" factor by including a combination of the following Top 20 Most Retweetable Words:

Timing for retweets:

Links posted on the weekend and at the end of the week have a higher click through rate.

Tip: Want to see how well a bit.ly link is doing, CTR?

Put a bit.ly link in the browser.

Type a plus sign after it;

Hit enter to see how many times it’s been clicked through.

Retweeting is an elegant viral mechanism.

Alright ... one more Twitter insight before we close ...

He had noted that women follow a lot more people and tend to tweet more. They are more social. (We already knew women talk and socialize more, but now Dan's numbers confirm it.)

Dan covered a lot of geeky ground focused on the science and study of social media, use of FourSquare and more.. I have 5+ pages of notes from Dan's presentation alone. But I'm concerned this blog post will get too long to be readable.

4th up and last race of the morning was the "Presentation Off" between Will Critchlow and Rand Fishkin.

I'll expand on that race in a follow-up post. Do you want to guess who won this year? Will went into the race with a 2-year winning streak.

About Dana Lookadoo —
Founder of Yo! Yo! SEO, a boutique search marketing agency.
Dana began optimizing websites for search engines in 1999 and has been focused on SEO as a marketing channel since 2003. Dana began a career in computing and training in 1984 and in Website Development and Online Marketing in 1996. Clientele has include Fortune 500 clients as well as small-to-medium-sized businesses.

It is a great help for all of us who could not attend this great event.

Today, we cannot just talk about SEO, its a complete blend of all online presence potential put together. SEO involves images, video, content and all the other search options available on a search result page. If your presence is felt on all the options only there is a possibility of complete online visibility and online presence.

Social media is surely again the next big medium on which people want to interact, communicate and discuss personally and professionally.

Social media buzz is surely going to affect the conversion factor as this buzz influences the visitor. Whether he comes to the site as a result of organic search and then he goes to the social media sites to catch up with what people are saying about the brand or whether he comes to know about the brand through social media sites and then comes to your site does not matter.

The main point is the social media buzz is an influential factor. Though currently there is still a lot of noise there but surely will get filtered out and the fittest will survive.

Its time we started speaking in terms of complete online presence packages rather than only SEO packages and pricing.

Very well said. I often use SEO as an opportunity to explain how organizatons must optimize their full online footprint for online visibility.

I hope to get notes from the 2nd half of day 1 up tomorrow, but the day ended with discussion of conversion rate optimization. After sending all this traffic from multiple sources, you need to convert them once they hit the site.

Think of how much you'll retain from the mozinar Dana. Having to parse so much info into such tiny posts (tiny compared to the volume of info that was coming out) means you'll be thinking and rethinking the content. Which means you'll really be steeped in it. Which will be a great thing for yoyoseo!

Yes, typically we've used the "contact us" or other clearly call-to-action page as the landing page for ads and that has worked fine. This post just happened to make me think about this subj. and I realized I'd never really given it much thought. I'm going to be running some tests along this line now :)

Yes, every page is a landing page for SEO. Many landing pages for paid search may not be visible for SERPs.

Your calls to action should relate to the audience for that page, i.e. if you are a lead gen site, then you want your home page to speak to audience in all 3 stages of the lead-gen buying cycle. Your contact form would speak to the audience in the later stage of the cycle.

Nice post. Interesting to know that women are more "sociable" than men when it comes to Twitter, however it probably is more likely perhaps that with the ability now to tweet from phones as well as laptops and pcs, the availability of it has become more attractive. Didn`t know that about tweeting at the end of the week, good spot.

This post was great for us not able to attend, though I still feel a little jealous, especially after reading the flurry of other tweets, and posts here on the blog. Was planning on attending too, but things got way too busy for me to get away this time around. Thanks for keeping us abreast along the way.

I like Dan's take on Twitter realm. It still surprises me that a lot of businesses shun the idea of Twitter. It's a relationship building tool that if used properly and positively can yield great results. Not only gaining you more followers but a more positive and friendly presence online as well. Like he said, if I want negativity I'll turn on the news.

Twitter is a tough nut for a lot of companies to crack. If you treat it like a broadcast medium, nobody will listen and it's ineffective. But if you try to communicate and your target demographic isn't inclined to talk about you/your products or doesn't use Twitter, it's like being at a party wearing a funny hat and having nobody to share the cake with.

Sometimes I feel like we all suffer from low self-esteem and think that what we sell/offer isn't really interesting enough to discuss online, be it on a blog or on Twitter. The truth typically is that there are people out there interested in everything (it's a big world!) but trying to think of something "engaging" feels like trying to solve world hunger.

Yes. Also, Twitter needs someone full-time on it for companies to use it properly. It's easy enough to auto-tweet your latest blog post, far more time-consuming to engage with people and build relationships. So that makes it difficult for some companies to justify.

I've seen some of Dan's presentations before, and they are really good. Let me help you a bit by explaining what you should take from the list:

1) People on twitter like to talk about "twitter" and "social" "media". Not so surprisingly, people on Facebook tend to like stuff that has Facebook in it too.

2) Call to actions really work- the best way to get a retweet is to say "please retweet."

3) The same thing that gets diggs, stumbles, links, etc works on twitter too. "Top" "10" "How to" "Free" are ranked high due to their content. "Check out" "blog post" "new blog post" all have to do with content. People retweet content- especially stuff that sounds cool! In fact, I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that more than half of RTs including links come from people that did not click on the link.

Try this: "please retweet- free top 10 list of how to help social media efforts through twitter- new blog post LINK" should leave you with about 10 chars after a bit.ly link :)